Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me Is a Classic for Our Time

In a year that has demolished once and for all the myth that we live in a post-racial society, To Kill a Mockingbird has never felt like less of a timepiece. Few books are as deeply ingrained in American self-regard as **Harper Lee’**s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1960 classic. A coming-of-age novel as well as a father-daughter story, most of us read it when we, like Scout, are still children, at a time when we too are beginning to come into an understanding of the unfairness of the world (and, for some of us, the reality of racial injustice). But coming of age is a process that stretches well into adulthood, as Go Set a Watchman (Harper), the long-buried novel Lee wrote in the fifties from the perspective of her 26-year-old self, reminds us. Released last week to much fanfare—it has already sold more than a million copies—the novel is of interest less for its artistic merit (written before To Kill a Mockingbird, it lacks that book’s propulsion and stakes) than for the timing of its publication and the oddly ingenuous reaction to it.

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By now _Watchman’_s core revelation is well out of the bag: Jean Louise, as Scout, Harper Lee’s fictional stand-in, is known, returns to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York, and realizes that her beloved father, Atticus, is, in fact, a bigot. Atticus, of course, is the hero attorney at the center of Mockingbird, the man who defends an innocent black man against charges that he raped a white woman. Further immortalized in the film adaptation by Gregory Peck, he’s endured in the American imagination as the very embodiment of fair-minded masculinity and justice. In Watchman, we get a different take on Atticus, who, to put it mildly, has not embraced the civil rights movement. He’s no cross-burning Klansman, but a racist of a more banal and therefore insidious sort, one who masquerades as a rational, utopia-defending gentleman while believing that blacks are too childlike to vote, one who asks his daughter, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” Black lives matter, people like Atticus thought (and continue to think)—just not as much as those of whites.

But it’s a mistake to believe, as some have written, that the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman doesn’t align with that of To Kill a Mockingbird. (Even more irritating are the articles in which white parents with children named Atticus rue the name’s freshly tainted connotation.) The difference is one of perspective: Jean Louise is no longer a naive little girl, but a woman with views of her own, who has seen the world beyond the neighbor’s fence and who has no use for false utopias built on fear, intimidation, and corseted upholders of the status quo. Watchman, in the end, is less a novel than a series of stagey debates in which Atticus patronizes his prodigal daughter—“Honey, use your head!”—but there is one extraordinary scene in it: a moment in which Jean Louise sees through the deferential but distant manner of Calpurnia, the black maid who raised her following the death of her own mother. “Did you hate us?” Jean Louise asks. Calpurnia’s ambivalent response says it all. Coming of age is all about disillusionment, about the pain of seeing the heroes of our childhood with adult awareness, and the understanding of how unsettlingly close the mechanisms of oppression reside. Scout has finally toppled her white idol father from his pedestal; it’s high time we did the same.

Photo: Courtesy of Random House

A white daughter dismantles the mythologies of the father; a black father explains America’s to his son. Prize-winning essayist and The Atlantic correspondent **Ta-Nehisi Coates’**s new memoir, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau), is an open letter to his fifteen-year-old son, Samori, prompted by Samori’s devastated reaction to last November’s announcement that no criminal charges would be brought against the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed an unarmed teen named Michael Brown. “Race is the child of racism, not the father,” Coates reminds us, moving from his own often fear-filled childhood in Baltimore to a brilliant take-down of America’s boundless romance with its own delusion of innocence and equality, otherwise known as the American Dream. The Dream, writes Coates, “is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. . . . The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” An homage, in part, to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, it’s hard to think of a book that feels more necessary right now. Urgent, lyrical, and devastating in its precision, Coates has penned a new classic of our time.